EMF-IncQuery

The EMF-IncQuery project is happy to report that with our new release 1.0.0 the project is graduating out of incubation and reaches a new level of maturity. All downloads are available now from the Eclipse.org download servers or the Eclipse Marketplace. Coinciding with this event is the first public release of the new generation of theVIATRA model transformation framework, which is a complete re-write (downloads,Marketplace).

Starting with EMF-IncQuery version 1.0.0.201503271636, it is possible to formulate patterns which query non-trivial structural features of UML models such as qualified name, which didn't work before. Let's see this feature in action through a small example that validates UML models!

We have released version 0.9.0 of EMF-IncQuery, a release involving a major refactor of our query backend to support non-EMF query scopes, some minor user facing features and fixing a selection of bugs. In addition, the tooling has been updated to use Xtext 2.7. It is recommended for all users of EMF-IncQuery to update to this latest version, which is available both from Eclipse Marketplace and the project download page.

We are proud to announce that this year’s EclipseCon again had a talk about EMF-IncQuery, this time in the context of an integration project with a different modeling world. During the summer, we have started to work on the MPS-IncQuery project, which aims to bring IncQuery’s powerful features to the world of the Meta Programming System (MPS) from JetBrains. MPS is a powerful language workbench which is designed to ease the development of domain specific and general purpose languages, plus their IDEs.

Views are key concepts of domain-specific modeling in order to provide specific focus of the designers by abstracting from unnecessary details of the underlying abstract model. Usually, these views are represented as models themselves (view models), computed from the source model. However, the efficient maintenance of views when the source model changes is challenging, as recalculation from scratch has to be avoided to achieve scalability. This benchmark aims to measure query-based view model creation performance from detailed source models with the EMF-IncQuery framework.

Model-driven tools use model queries for many purposes, including validation of well-formedness rules and specification of derived features. The majority of declarative model query corpus available in industry appears to use the OCL language. Graph pattern based queries, however, would have a number of advantages due to their more abstract specification, such as performance improvements through advanced query evaluation techniques. As query performance can be a key issue with large models, evaluating graph patterns instead of OCL queries could be useful in practice. The measurements presented here give justification to automatically mapping OCL to equivalent graph patterns by showing that one can deliver efficient, incremental query evaluation for a subset of OCL expressions.